I love the AMC show Mad Men. I don’t know what it is really… the 60s outfits, the fact that people are pretty much allowed to do anything at work or the cool opening sequence… I think it’s the opening sequence. Which is why the Simpson’s spoof of the opening for their Halloween special this year is awesome:

I’m sure you’ve seen it or heard it. I’m talking about the Embarq advertisement for free TV.

Obviously it’s a popular ad.

But what’s the appeal? I simply don’t know. What bugs me most, however, is the little ditty “they don’t call her Queen Tut, for nothin'”

It’s about her being made of gold and calling her Queen Tut. Anyone else see the problem?

RIIIIIGHT. It’s King Midas who was tied to gold, not Tut! So “Queen Tut” doesn’t make any sense at all. Even the fact that King Tut was buried in a coffin made of gold doesn’t validate the ad. I wouldn’t buy Embarq now if for no other reason than their misappropriation of history. Get it right if you’re gonna’ hang your hat on it.

So, while I’m hip with the various dopey yet catchy freecreditreport.com jingles, the Embarq one just irks me.

Well, it’s not like I’m some sort of prescient person and know what the world is really thinking about… but there have been a few instances of things I write about in the last few months actually capturing some amount of world-wide attention. So this post is simply a note to the file on what happened.

Randy PauschRemember the post from a few months ago about the Last Lecture? Randy was diagnosed with cancer, fought a hell of a fight and along the way, delivered what many people consider to be the greatest inspirational speech of all time. He died on July 25, 2008. It’s not only a tragedy for his wife and children… but also for the millions of people he was able (and will continue) to inspire.

McFly NikesMuch less important than Randy, Nike actually responded to the cultural request of my generation and has released the Hyperdunks’s. Here is info. And more info. And even more. Awesome. Now people are working on the auto-lacing mechanism.

Pandering to my GenerationSongs from the 80s continue to permeate the current cultural zeitgeist. Which isn’t really saying much. In fact, with the Olympics on TV, I get the same round of commercials over and over and over and over and… oops, sorry. Stuck in a loop.

Anyways, what I was saying is that I get to see a lot of the same commercials. One of them is for JC Penny. The commercial’s background music is Simple Minds’ classic “Don’t You (forget about me)” from one of my favorite movies, The Breakfast Club. The kids in the commercial are reenacting several of the scenes from the movie – and I turn to Tina and ask – “so, do you think the director had to explain to them: OK… now I want you to run down this hallway really fast, then do a floor-slide past the turn and run back towards the camera? Or do you think he just showed them the movie?”

But commercials aren’t the only things participating in this recycling lifestyle. I actually saved money by getting digital cable the other day… which now gives me access to all of my favorite shows from my formative years. Emergency!, CHiPs, Quincy, Kojak, A-Team, Knight Rider (though the new series starts on 9/24!!!). But I realized that these shows, while all cutesily fatally flawed (it’s really funny to see some of the “procedures” performed by John and Roy on Emergency! and compare them to what I learned as an EMT 19 years later), are really the genesis for almost all of TV today:

I grew up watching all sorts of shows about people my age trying to deal with life. The Facts of Life, 90201, then on to Melrose Place and Friends. Most of these shows had a fatal flaw. They were populated by self-centered, narcissistic, vapid characters.

One of my favorite toys as a child (and yes, even as an adult), is Lego. The bricks are great fun for stress relief and they require at least some amount of imagination. I have sets back from the early 70s all the way to a pristine, in-the-box collection of all of the Harry Potter-related sets (I don’t know why I’m keeping them in the box, other than to say I have them… maybe I’d let my kids play with them?).

But the toy villain from my youth has got to be the Rubik’s Cube. They musta’ released a billion versions of that thing in the 80s. And if 9 squares/side wasn’t bad enough in about 10 different sizes (from microscopically small to desk-size large), the 12 square/side version (Rubik’s Revenge, I believe it was called) was awful. Then they released them in ball-shaped versions, triangle-shaped versions… even a thing called the snake.

So I’m quite happy to see that someone took the time to build a Lego Mindstorms (computer-controlled Legos) set that is designed to solve a Rubik’s Cube. It works by color-reading each side, generating a solution set and executing it. Check it out:

Now… I’m into negotiation, so you’d think that I’d love this show. I mean sure, the technology is cool – I wouldn’t mind having someone assist every now and again with a voice in my ear while I’m in the middle of a negotiation… but the rest of the show just drags on.

To be honest, I was hoping for a little less talky-talky and a little more shooty-shooty.